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Nothing like news of American remakes of Asian movies to get you through the week, eh? Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinsky is setting up a remake of South Korea's 2006 monster hit (pun clearly intended) The Host over at Universal, but he won't be directing.

Meanwhile, the Steven Spielberg/Will Smith Oldboy project gets a screenwriter for their remake of the 2003 revenge thriller.

Variety reports that commercial director Fredrik Bond will be helming the remake from a script by Mark Poirier. Bond has directed commercials for Nike and Adidas among others, but never a feature film. Verbinsky set up the project at Universal because he's currently directing the movie version of Bioshock for them.

It's interesting that they got Poirier to draft the screenplay. Poirier wrote Noam Murro's dramedy Smart People, and the duo is currently working on the drama Hateship, Friendship, Courtship starring Julian Moore. The original Host was as much a story about a quirky dysfunctional family as it was a monster flick, so it's quite refreshing to see a writer working on it with thesame background rather than, I dunno, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

In comparison, DreamWorks nabbed screenwriter Mark Protosevich to write the Oldboy remake, says THR. Protosevich wrote the beautiful-looking stinker The Cell and the just-plain-stinker Poseidon. He also wrote a dark and cynical draft for I Am Legend before Akiva Goldsman rewrote it into what it was when Will Smith came onboard the film. Maybe they'll have Akiva do a polish for this one also?

The horror...